{ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both of the University of Manchester, “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” | ScienceDaily | full story }
Atkins-style low-carbohydrate diets help people lose weight, but people who simply replace the bread and pasta with calories from animal protein and animal fat may face an increased risk of early death from cancer and heart disease, a new study reports.
The study found that the death rate among people who adhered most closely to a low-carb regimen was 12 percent higher over about two decades than with those who consumed diets higher in carbohydrates.
But death rates varied, depending on the sources of protein and fat used to displace carbohydrates.
photo { Helmut Newton }
related { Every five years the federal government updates its dietary guidelines for Americans. This year, with most Americans overweight or obese and at risk of high blood pressure, policymakers are working to reinvent the familiar food pyramid and develop advice that is simple and blunt enough to help turn the tide. | Washington Post | Continue reading }
Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) introduces the importance of a philosophy of difference. (…)
Repetition may be variable, and thus may include difference within itself. (…)
A simple repetition is a mechanical, stereotyped repetition of the same element, while a complex repetition is a repetition which has difference hidden within itself. (…)
1) that everyone already knows how “thought” is to be defined; 2) that common sense and good sense guarantee this knowledge and understanding; 3) that recognition of an object is determined by the sameness of the object; 4) that representation can appropriately subordinate the concept of difference to the Same and the Similar, the Analogous and the Opposed; 5) that any error which occurs in thinking is caused by external rather than internal mechanisms; 6) that the truth of a proposition is only determined by what is designated by the proposition; 7) that problems are only defined by their solutions; and 8) that learning is only a means of gaining knowledge. Deleuze explains that these eight postulates are significant obstacles to the understanding of difference and repetition.
{ Alex Scott | Continue reading | Quote: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 304, 1882 }
{ Colonel Rosa Klebb, a high ranking member of the feared Russian counter-intelligence agency SMERSH, and main antagonist from the James Bond film and novel From Russia with Love | Wikipedia | more }
Grunting During a Tennis Shot May Provide a Competitive Advantage
Some tennis fans and players feel that grunting during a tennis shot distracts the opponent, and therefore provides an unfair competitive advantage. Many professional tennis players grunt; one of them (Maria Sharapova) is reported to grunt at over 100 decibels. (…)
Grunting slowed down student response time by between 21 and 33 milliseconds, and the students made between 3% and 4% more predicted directional errors, whether the video clips ended at contact with the ball or 100 milliseconds afterwards. These differences in time and error were statistically significant.
Laws banning texting or talking on a mobile phone while driving don’t reduce car accidents.
“In fact,” concludes the US Highway Loss Data Institute, “[texting] bans are associated with a slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes.”
This counter-intuitive revelation comes from a study by the HLDI, which compared insurance-claim data in states that enacted texting bans with the same data in states where no such laws exist. Data from after the bans took affect was also compared to stats before the bans took effect.
Texting bans did not reduce accident rates, and in some states the accident rates increased after the bans went into effect. “In California, Louisiana and Minnesota,” the HDLI reports, “the bans are associated with small but statistically significant increases in collision claims (7.6%, 6.7%, and 8.9%, respectively).”
{ It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life. Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra. | NY Times | full story }
Woman to be stoned to death in Iran will be hanged instead.
The plan was for the heroin to go from anus to mouth, to mouth, and then all the way to anus again.
3-year-old caught with pot in school.
Woman sets husband’s penis alight to stop him cheating.
Multi-millionaire owner of Segway died in a freak accident while riding Segway
The true Pope lives in a town of 130 people in rural Kansas.
Cops find 20 frozen cats in vacant rowhouse.
Indian authorities have drafted in a crack troop of monkeys to guard foreign athletes.
Two-legged pig becomes tourist attraction in China.
Ever wonder what’s in those delicious dumplings? The Mathematics of Boneless Pork Rectums.
Las Vegas hotel guests left with severe burns from ‘death ray’ caused by building’s design.
Las Vegas faces its deepest slide since the 1940s.
The Federal Reserve Board announced a delay in the issue date of the redesigned $100 note.
Cell phones, cancer, and scientific oversimplification.
Faith in God associated with improved survival after liver transplantation.
Why young adults change their religious beliefs.
Study finds genital herpes vaccine ineffective in women.
The difference between linguistics and logistics.
OMG, CEO, BFF… When did we start speaking in sets of capital letters? Lane Greene looks into the rise of the acronym and its sibling the initialism.
Words That Google Instant Doesn’t Like.
How are you able to fund a label with such a niche audience?
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion. “Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperform all the other religious groups in our survey.”
Track and forecast public debt in countries around the world, live.
{ Douglas Huebler, Duration piece #31, Boston, 1974 | On December 31st, 1973, Douglas Huebler photographed a woman, an eight of a second before midnight. The exposure time was one fourth of a second, so the woman had half of her body in 1973 and the other half in 1974. }
The Windmills of Your Mind, music written by Michel Legrand, with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair.
Noel Harrison performed the song for the film score. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1969 (Harrison’s father, the British actor Rex Harrison, had performed the previous year’s Oscar-winning “Talk to the Animals”).
The opening two melodic sentences were adapted from Mozart’s second movement from his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Lyrics and guitar chord transcription | Listen | Download }
Scientists found that humans exhibit two types of memory. They call one “verbatim trace,” in which events are recorded very precisely and factually. Children have more “verbatim trace,” but as they mature, they develop more and more of a second type of memory: “gist trace,” in which they recall the meaning of an event, its emotional flavor, but not precise facts. Gist trace is the most common cause of false memories, occurring most often in adults. Research shows that children are less likely to produce false memories, because gist trace develops slowly.
{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }
Psychological scientists have discovered all sorts of ways that false memories get created, and now there’s another one for the list: watching someone else do an action can make you think you did it yourself. (…)
They found that people who had watched a video of someone else doing a simple action — shaking a bottle or shuffling a deck of cards, for example — often remembered doing the action themselves two weeks later.
{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading | Related: People can easily create false memories of their past and a new study shows that such memories can have long-term effects on our behavior. }
photo { František Drtikol }
Red is a color evoked by light consisting of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye.
Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared (below red), and cannot be seen by the naked human eye.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
In Judo, for instance, fighters are allocated Blue or White prior to competition, and in Taekwon-Do, the colours are Red and Blue. Boxers often wear multi-coloured or patterned trunks, but the colour of the gloves is often different.
Hill and Barton (2005) demonstrated that in the 2004 Olympic Games Red competitors were significantly more successful than blue competitors in an even contest. Basically, Red doesn’t give you a +10 str, but it will a) tip the bias of the point recorders in your favour; b) increase one’s competitiveness; or c) scare you opponent just enough so that you have an advantage.
Their paper, published in Nature, does not speculate on the cause – a, b, and c are my own speculations. They also found that Red vs. non-red and non-blue also tipped the advantage to the red competitors. It kind of stands to reason – red is a scary colour, it’s a natural marker of many evolutionary elements, and it’s visually arresting , like black.
I thought maybe it has to do with dominance of colour – but Dijkstra and Preenen (2008) demonstrated that in Judo (where competition is between blue v white) there is no relative advantage to blue – which is arguable the more dominant colour.
photo { Adam Amengual }
New study finds groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks. (…)
That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris. (…)
The average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall. (…)
Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. “We didn’t design this study to focus on the gender effect,” Malone says. “That was a surprise to us.” However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average.
photo { Helmut Newton }
Look out into space and the signs are plain to see. The universe began in a Big Bang event some 13 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. And the best evidence from the distance reaches of the cosmos is that this expansion is accelerating.
That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means the universe will expand forever. And a universe that expands forever is infinite and eternal.
Today, a group of physicists rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding universe cannot be so because the laws of physics do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the universe must end, say Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. And they have calculated when that is most likely to happen.
Their argument is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful. Here’s how it goes. If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.
This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible observation, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these events occurring. And when that happens, the laws of physics simply don’t apply. They just break down. “This is known as the “measure problem” of eternal inflation,” say Bousso and buddies. (…)
When might his be? Bousso and co have crunched the numbers. “Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years,” they say.
{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }
This timeline of the Big Bang describes the history of the universe according to the prevailing scientific theory of how the universe came into being. (…) The best available measurements as of 2010 suggest that the initial conditions occurred between 13.3 and 13.9 billion years ago.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say.
Unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of “cosmic forgetfulness.”
The Big Bang is often thought as the start of everything, including time, making any questions about what happened during it or beforehand nonsensical. Recently scientists have instead suggested the Big Bang might have just been the explosive beginning of the current era of the universe, hinting at a mysterious past.
The Chaotic Inflation theory is a variety of the inflationary universe model, which is itself an extension of the Big Bang theory. It was proposed by physicist Andrei Linde. (…)
The Chaotic Inflation theory is in some ways similar to Fred Hoyle’s Steady state theory, as it employs the metaphor of a universe that is eternally existing, and thus does not require a unique beginning or an ultimate end of the cosmos.
semantic bonus:
